The Life and Times of Jeff Squyres

Firewire guppies

This week I got to attend a WebEx meeting (meaning: teleconference + simultaneously visiting a web site where the teleconference speaker was flipping through his slides) about how email and related services work behind the scenes at Cisco. It was actually pretty fascinating.

Everyone takes email for granted these days, but only a handful of tech geeks (relatively speaking) really understand how complicated email really is. Email is hard. Very hard. Especially when you have a single top-level domain (cisco.com) that has to span a world-wide organization. It takes some really well-thought out architecting to make it “just work” for the tens of thousands of Cisco employees around the world.

Here’s the white paper describing how Cisco does its messaging — fascinating stuff if you’re into such things: